Sareeta Vala
NLP Trainer, Consultant and Businesswoman
I’m Sareeta; NLP trainer, consultant and businesswoman, based in London.
Most of what I do circles one question: how a person keeps hold of their own mind in a world that’s very good at doing their thinking for them. I’m drawn to the quiet machinery of influence, the way we absorb other people’s stories and start mistaking them for our own, and to what it takes to reclaim a self you actually chose rather than inherited. That thread runs through my training, my coaching, my writing, and the conversations I have.
Writing is where I do my real thinking. My style is direct, dry, and more interested in the uncomfortable question than the comfortable answer. I’d rather leave someone with something to chew on than something to nod along to.
I’m endlessly curious about the places that rigour and mystery overlap, lately somewhere as unlikely as quantum physics, and what it has to say about how a mind decides who it’s allowed to be. Wherever I land, the work is the same: helping people notice the stories running them, and choose again.
My first Thought Labs retreat was this year and that shifted something in how I train and show up. Feeling a change in the body lands in a way that being told about it never does, and that discovery gave me permission to bring more of myself, more play and more quirk, into the room.
That’s also where my way into “fully alive” comes from. I do a lot of different things, trainer, coach, writer, and probably a few selves I haven’t met yet, and I’ve stopped treating that as a problem to solve. To me, being fully alive is refusing to collapse yourself into one fixed thing and calling it final. It’s staying open to who you’re still becoming. That question, and what it costs us to answer it too soon, is exactly what my session sits inside.
28th November
Session Details – 2026
Don't Look At The Coin: The Art Of Staying Open
We treat certainty as a sign of being alive. The person who knows what they want, who’s sure, who’s decided, seems more awake than the rest of us. We chase that feeling. We want our minds made up… but do we really know why?
There’s a case for the opposite. A coin is at its most interesting in the air, when it could still be anything. The moment it lands, the possibility is gone, and only the fact remains. People work the same way. Something in us is most alive in the open questions, the things we haven’t pinned down yet, the versions of ourselves we haven’t ruled out.
Most of us can’t bear to stay there. We reach for the answer, any answer, to end the discomfort of not knowing. We call it decisiveness. It costs us more than we think – in who we become, in what we attempt, in how much of our own life we actually get to live.
This session sits inside that discomfort on purpose, and asks what being fully alive might mean if it lives in the questions rather than the answers. Expect a little quantum physics, one poet from 1817, and something you’ve already decided that might deserve a second look. You’ll leave with a small practice for holding an open question longer than feels comfortable and a sense of why the not-yet-decided might be exactly where the life you want has been waiting.
WHAT PEOPLE WALK AWAY WITH:>
- A four-move practice — Catch, Flip, Hold, Choose: a move they can run on themselves the moment they notice they’ve decided something too fast.
- A decision, held open — one real thing they’d ruled out, reopened in the room,
- The open hand — a felt, trainable way to stay in not-knowing without panicking, grounded in real breath science.
- A shift that outlasts the room: — uncertainty isn’t the thing you endure until you can be certain; it’s where the alive part lives. That reframe changes how they hold every decision: as a coach, a leader, a friend or something else.